A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
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Life and Works: Prolific playwright, pioneer of Spanish drama, author of as many as 1800 comedias and several hundred shorter dramatic pieces, of which about 500 have been printed. Lope de Vega's achievement is considered among Spanish writers second only to that of Cervantes. His life was as dramatic as his plays: he was a volunteer on the Invincible Armada; his many love affairs brought him both notoriety and problems with the law, resulting in prison terms and exile. Lope de Vega was born in Madrid on Dec. 12, 1562, to a family of undistinguished origins, recent arrivals in the capital from Valle de Carriedo in Cantabria, whose breadwinner, Félix de Vega, was an embroiderer. King Philip II had recently named Madrid capital of the vast Spanish Empire; soon it became an international center swarming with bureaucrats, diplomats, grandees, hidalgos, soldiers, poets, dramatists, actors, actresses, thugs, picaros, judges, magistrates, wild-eyed dreamers, and foreigners from nearly everywhere. In Lope's childhood, plays were given in corrales, or open courtyards, owned by religious societies. These societies rented their courtyards to producers of plays; the income was used to care for the old and the indigent, thus early identifying Spanish drama with ecclesiastical philanthropy. By the time of Lope's young adulthood, plays at the Corral of the Cross and the Corral of the Prince were attracting eager audiences. With the increasing demand for comedias, other corrales opened in Madrid, Seville, Toledo, Valencia, Granada, Cordova, Barcelona, and Valladolid. The first indications of young Lope's genius became apparent in his earliest years. At the age of five he was already reading Spanish and Latin, by his tenth birthday he was translating Latin verse, and he wrote his first play when he was 12. His fourteenth year found him enrolled in the Colegio Imperial, a Jesuit school in Madrid, from which he absconded to take part in a military expedition in Portugal. Following that escapade, he had the good fortune of being taken into the protection of the Bishop of Ávila, who recognized the lad's talent and saw him enrolled in the University of Alcalá de Henares. Following graduation Lope was planning to follow in his patron's footsteps and join the priesthood, but those plans were dashed by his falling in love and realizing that celibacy was not for him. In 1583 Lope enlisted in the army, and he saw action with the Spanish Navy in the Azores. Following this he returned to Madrid and began his career as a playwright in earnest. He also began a love affair with Elena Osorio, an actress and the daughter of a leading theater owner. When, after some five years of this torrid affair, Elena spurned Lope in favor of another suitor, his vitriolic attacks on her and his family landed him in jail for libel and, ultimately, earned him the punishment of two years' banishment from Castile. But the affair supplied him with subject matter for one of his masterpieces, La Dorotea, published 3 years before his death. In 1588 Lope married Isabela de Urbina from Madrid. Her aristocratic family had opposed the marriage with the lowborn Lope. After a few weeks of the marriage, Lope signed up for another tour of duty with the Spanish navy: this was the summer of 1588, and the Invincible Armada was about to sail against England. During this period he wrote La hermosura de Angélica, which had as its model Ariosto's Orlando Furioso. Lope's luck again served him well, and his ship, the San Juan, was one of the few vessels to make it home to Spanish harbors in the aftermath of that failed expedition. Back in Spain, he settled with Isabela in the city of Valencia to live out the remainder of exile and to recommence, as prolifically as ever, his career as a dramatist. He entered in 1590 the service of the Duke of Alba, and remained in Toledo until 1595. Isabella died in the spring of that year, and Lope returned to Madrid, where he was prosecuted for an illicit relationship with Antonia Trillo. He also wrote sonnets to Lucinda, a literary pseudonym for Micaela de Luxán, a mysterious beauty, who bore him several children, among them Marcela, who became a nun, and Lope Félix. Lope married in 1598 Doña Juana de Guardo, daughter of a wealthy butcher. He became the secretary to the Marqués de Malpica and Marques de Sarría. In the next years Lope divided his time between Seville, where Micaela and their children lived, and Madrid. His fame as a dramatist had been established by the turn of the century, and in 1598 Lope gained fame as a ballad writer with the pastoral romance La Arcadia. In 1605 he became friends with the Duke of Sessa and his confidential secretary. In spite of his popularity, supporters in the nobility, and productivity, Lope was troubled by financial problems. His son Carlos Félix died in 1612, which also depressed him deeply. In 1614 he entered a religious order and was appointed an officer of the Inquisition. Marta de Nevares, called "Amarilis" in his poetry, seemed to Lope to be the ideal woman he had spent his life searching for. In her middle 20s, she flattered him with the gift of her youth and beauty, and she was in turn flattered by his great fame. His letters and his verse tell how he idolized her. But Marta had a husband, "a brutish man, " according to Lope, who became more and more jealous, finally bringing Lope and Marta before an ecclesiastical court. For weeks the scandal of the trial filled Lope and Marta with anguish. Marta, fully as much as Lope, wanted to be rid of the man to whom her parents had married her against her wishes. Besides, she was pregnant with Lope's child. After prolonged labor, the child was born and baptized Antonia Clara. When, soon afterward, an unsuccessful attempt was made on Lope's life, he blamed Hernández. During the lengthy litigation Roque Hernández died. In a letter to the Duke of Sessa, Lope expressed savage joy at the news. Marta then moved with their daughter to Lope's house. In the same household lived Feliciana, daughter of his second wife, Juana, and Lopito, natural son of Micaela de Lujan - a singular household for a priest. Lope's work as a playwright was not approved by the church, but he wrote many of his comedias during his priesthood. Pope Urban VIII, however, idolized him and made him Knight of Malta and doctor of theology in 1627. Lope's daughter Amarilis, who was stricken with blindness and insanity, died in 1632. His son Lope Félix drowned off the coast of Venezuela, and another daughter, Antonia, was abducted by a courtier. Lope turned more and more to religious contemplation and exercises, scourging himself so furiously that he bloodied the walls of his room. Aggressive and growing competition from younger playwrights disheartened Lope professionally. The audience's tastes were changing, leaving him somewhat behind the times. In his last days professional frustration as well as personal grief, melancholy, and remorse enveloped him. His sense of contrition was so strong that he flagellated himself regularly, following a medieval practice of atonement. He died of scarlet fever in Madrid on August 27, 1635. Most of his large income was devoted to charity and the church. His state funeral lasted for nine days. Lope's productivity was phenomenal: he boasted that he had numerous times composed a piece and brought it on the stage within 24 hours. The themes for his works Lope chose easily, according to the taste of his audience. Some of his works were based on his own chaotic love life. It is clear that Lope wrote primarily for the common man; and to judge by the structure and content of what he wrote, the common man ordered the three-act form; disavowal of Aristotle's rules; the presence of a comic (gracioso) to enliven the play with playful, boisterous, or farcical humor often parodying serious lines; verse rather than prose; and a rapid succession of scenes, complex intrigues, and subplots in preference to unified character development. Lope's audiences demanded plays dealing with honor, religion, love, history (both national and foreign), and Spain's own epic and ballad material. Of all these, Lope said, plays about el honor pleased playgoers most of all. Possibly no word in the language occurred more frequently in the comedias of the period - not even amor. In Spain custom required women to guard the family honor according to a complex and stringent set of rules which were contradictory and obscure. Even so, on the stage, honor was presented as something to be cherished as life itself; when honor was sullied, it should be "washed in blood." Duels to the death acted out on the stage were standard fare, and fencing skill was indispensable training for all actors. The upper classes claimed exclusive possession of honor, but Lope ascribed it as well to the common man. In his best-known play, Fuenteovejuna, he exalts the sense of honor of the peasants of the village of Fuenteovejuna who rose in rebellion against an arrogant young governor (comendador) who considered peasants barely above cattle. Becoming predatory toward the young peasant women, he precipitated a violent revolt in which the villagers stormed his palace and slew him - all done in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella. When the Catholic Sovereigns sent a judge to punish the offenders, he followed the current practice of torturing witnesses to obtain evidence. The judge's question and the villagers' answer are famous in Spanish drama: "Who killed the Comendador?" "Fuenteovejuna, señor." Even women and children withstood the torture. Because the insurrection was instigated and consummated in the name of monarchy, Fuenteovejuna was given reprieve, and Lope himself evaded prosecution by the lynx-eyed government authorities, always on the alert for signs of insurgency. A large number of Lope's plays were based on saints' lives and dramatic - and sometimes sentimental - stories from ancient tradition. Lo fingido verdadero (ca. 1608; From Make-believe to Reality) depicts a playwrightactor, Ginés, commanded by Emperor Diocletian to put on a play ridiculing the new sect of dissenters called Christians. In complying with the Emperor's wishes, Ginés feigns Christianity with such fervor that he is caught up in its spirit and miraculously converted, even though conversion means swift execution. La buena guarda (ca. 1610; The Good Guard) portrays a young treasurer of a convent who, before running away with a lover, devoutly commends herself to the Virgin Mary and leaves the treasury keys on the Virgin's altar. When the nun returns, shattered from her experience and repentant, she finds the keys where she had left them and her absence unnoticed - the Virgin Mary had substituted for her to save her from disgrace. Among Lope's secular plays built on legend, Las famosas asturianas (ca. 1612; The Famous Asturian Women) is representative. The play dramatizes a moving incident alleged to have occurred in the centuries-long war between the Christians and Moors in Spain (711-1492). Although Lope customarily wrote by formula, the variety of his characters strikes one with wonder. In El remedio en la desdicha (ca. 1600; Help in Adversity) he portrays gallant, romanticized Moors in contest with equally gallant and romanticized Christians. In La hermosa Ester (ca. 1610; Esther the Beautiful) he depicts sympathetically a Jewish protagonist from the Old Testament and contrasts her with the infamous Haman. In the notoriously sensational El prodigio de Etiopia (The Ethiopian Prodigy) the author portrays a white woman fulfilling her promise "to give her hand" to the Ethiopian emperor by severing her hand and tendering it to him. Partly because of the play's repugnant sensationalism, its authorship, like that of many other plays of the time also ascribed to Lope, has been called into question. Lope's greatest nondramatic work is La Dorotea (1632). This work, a novel in dialogue form interspersed with lyric verse, is a frank, largely autobiographical confession alternately sentimental, lyrical, extravagant, capricious, angry, and eloquent. He wrote voluminously in all genres: the pastoral novel La Arcadia (1598) presents contemporary celebrities thinly veiled under pseudonyms; the peripatetic novel El peregrino en su patria (1604; The Pilgrim in His Own Country) traces the starcrossed fate of two lovers; the devotional novel Los pastores de Belén (1612;The Shepherds of Bethlehem) revolves around a group of herdsmen gathered outside Bethlehem some weeks before the birth of Christ. Lope wrote many pieces in the genres of epic and narrative poetry, both popular in his day. La Dragontea (1598; Drake the Pirate) distilled in verse an entire Spanish nation's animosity toward Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth I. The long poem La corona trágica (1627;The Tragic Crown) reflected strong sectarian solicitude for Catholic Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, and, like Drake the Pirate, excoriated Elizabeth. Another epic poem, Jerusalén conquistada (1609;Jerusalem Regained), tells the story of the Third Crusade, pridefully including King Alfonso VIII of Castile, who never went. Lope de Vega's lyric poetry is interlaced throughout his vast literary production, and on a number of occasions he anthologized it. Two such anthologies are Rimas humanas (1602; Human Poetry) and Rimas sacras (1614; Spiritual Poetry). |
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